Pictures; one disappears and another appears. Most of the time, he doesn’t understand the connection between a picture and the one next to it. He needs someone who knows him well to tell about it and set the picture in motion, so it’s not still anymore.

When memories in head are like still pictures with no scenes from the past, how the memory works?

The theatre piece of the director Rabih Mroué is an impressive combination of the personal and political: For ‘Riding on a Cloud’ he invites his brother Yasser to play the role of a character that resembles him personally. A person, who was injured in the Lebanese civil war and lost his ability to use words, Yasser began to shoot videos, which fuse with his recounted memories on stage to form a subjective picture of the political developments in Lebanon. ‘Riding on a Cloud’ also describes the fragile construction of biography, which emerges between political reality, memories, facts and fiction. For Mroué this is always the starting point for artistic self-reflection, which he then transposes for the theatre and exhibitions.

Rabih Mroué born in Beirut and currently living in Berlin, is a theatre director, actor, visual artist and playwright. He is a contributing editor for The Drama Review /TDR (New York) and a co-founder of the Beirut Art Center (BAC).  He was a fellow at The International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures/ FU/Berlin from 2013 -2014. He has been a theatre-director at Münchner Kammerspiele from 2015 -2019.

In Arabic with English and Bulgarian surtitles.

Supported by Fonds Podiumkunsten, Prins Claus Fonds, Hivos & Stichting DOEN – (The Netherlands)

Special thanks to: Lina Saneh, Frie Leysen, Mroué’s family (Souad, Ahmad, Ammar, Ziad, Maha, Mazen, Nabil and Fatima Bazzi), Ahlam Awada, Samar Maakaroun, Janine Broud, Karma and Nadi Louis.

Thanks to: Hito Steyerl, Manal Khader, Eric Baudelaire, Paul Khodr, Lamia Joreige, Joanna Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Fariba Derakhshani, Mohamad Hojeiry, Matthias Lilienthal, Ali Zuraik, Louis Family, Petra Serhal, Hagop Derghougassian, Ziad Mroué, Christine Tohmé and Ashkal Alwan.